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Bloomberg Buys BusinessWeek From McGraw-Hill

Bloomberg is taking another step from the trading floor into the corner office.

The company said Tuesday that it was the winning bidder for BusinessWeek, the troubled 80-year-old title that McGraw-Hill had put on sale this summer.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the price was said to be near $5 million, plus assumption of liabilities, which were $31.9 million as of April.

The magazine will continue to be a weekly print publication, rechristened Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Decisions have not been made about BusinessWeek’s staff of more than 400 people; Bloomberg will select which of those employees it wants by the end of the year, when the deal closes. Those not selected will receive severance from McGraw-Hill, said a BusinessWeek executive.

Faced with slowing sales of its financial data terminals during the recession that have since improved, Bloomberg had been looking to expand its presence in consumer media. Clients for Bloomberg’s terminals are largely financial professionals, and the purchase of BusinessWeek, with its consumer and executive readers, gives the media company more access to the corporate offices as well.

With its gigantic newsroom of about 2,200 people and its aggressive reporting, Bloomberg has won a growing number of awards, but it is frustrated by its lack of cachet in the journalism world. Reporters and editors have long been frustrated by the lack of access to business executives, and they believed that limited their ability to break news and be a player in larger news coverage.

With the acquisition, Bloomberg adds name recognition and a consumer publication.

“In reality, the fact that our audience is somewhat narrow — basically all people who participate in the securities industry — to some extent limits our access to some of the people who actually make market-making news, like people in the c-suite or people in high government office,” said Daniel L. Doctoroff, president of Bloomberg.

“We want Bloomberg, now Bloomberg BusinessWeek, to be their first call when they have news that they are prepared to bring. Sometimes they won’t think of that because they are not typically consumers of Bloomberg news, subscribers to the Bloomberg terminal.”

Mr. Doctoroff said that beyond the added visibility, there were opportunities to make money with “a higher-quality, more in-depth, more global magazine that as a result is able to attract more advertisers and more subscribers at higher prices than they currently pay.”

He said the company was considering combining the Bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek.com Web sites and adding the BusinessWeek brand and journalists to Bloomberg TV. The company will continue Bloomberg Markets, a monthly magazine.

The company is also looking to BusinessWeek to help its core business, he said. “They aren’t just producing content which will be sold through consumer subscriptions or advertising,” he said. “That group produces content of enormous value as part of a package of products, the Bloomberg terminal that sells for $20,000 a year.”

Norman Pearlstine, the chief content officer at Bloomberg, said the company planned to put money into BusinessWeek.

Mr. Pearlstine will become chairman of BusinessWeek, “primarily a liaison position between Bloomberg News and BusinessWeek,” he said. Mr. Doctoroff said that Mr. Pearlstine would not become editor in chief or publisher. Decisions about the jobs of BusinessWeek editor in chief, Stephen J. Adler, and president, Keith Fox, and the rest of the staff have not been made, he said.

A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2009, on page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Bloomberg Buys Business Week From McGraw-Hill, Moving Into Consumer Media. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe